Clive James reviews the week's TV, including Tom Daley's celebrity
diving show Splash!

A riotous hit for ITV, the rave-up known as Splash! is such a rip-off from the Beeb’s Strictly Come Dancing that it could equally be called Strictly Come Diving or – considering the impact that some of the untrained contestants make on the surface of the water – Strictly Come Bombing.

But the plain theft of format doesn’t matter, because the spirit of the thing is as tingly and fresh as the fizz of chlorine bubbling from the pool. Superficially it’s all standard stuff. Half a dozen celebrities – some of them unknown to me, but if I were more in touch I would probably be shouting with recognition like the crowd in the bleachers – will compete for a place in the final after learning to dive under the tuition of Tom Daley.

Tom’s mere presence is a big plus for the show, which doesn’t have a Bruce Forsyth figure – just a couple of superfluous presenters to lead the yelling. Tom wears that little low-cut swimsuit that should have won him gold at the Olympics for having the best-defined groin. There is a poolside panel of judges, straight out of Strictly except that the equivalent of the dreaded Bruno is mercifully not present. One of the judges is Jo Brand. Less than 30 minutes beforehand, she has been baking custard slices for the BBC.

Jo Brand is everywhere and as far as I’m concerned she’s very welcome. As the divers climb, fall and crash, one hopes that her non-hysterical approach will influence the folks at home, who, needless to say, get a chance to add their incompetent vote by phoning in. But when it comes to the contestants, any resemblance to Strictly Come Dancing is left far behind.

The amateur dancers have to overcome ineptitude. The amateur divers have to overcome fear. It’s a primal thing, and every time the camera looks down from the top platform you get a delicious dose of the shivers. Crikey, it’s a long way down.

Many decades ago, it was me up there, but my lack of courage limited my diving career to a single one-and-a-half somersault that finished with my entire body hitting the water horizontally. The noise was of a crate of eggs being dropped on a concrete floor. There was no Tom Daley handy to shame me into having another try.

Left to himself, Omid Djalili, he of the curvaceous tum-tum, would plunge to destruction every time, but here he has been nurtured. He still enters the water with his legs splayed as if he were riding a horse, but he does the dive. For my money he is practically the funniest man in Britain even when he is only talking, but here he doesn’t need to talk. He just needs to launch himself into space, whereupon gravity takes him down like a grand piano.

The last time I watched, Omid should have won the night for sheer bravery, but he had his thunder stolen by Eddie the Eagle. On Eddie’s past reputation, you were expecting his dive from the tower to end up on top of Joe Brand or perhaps in the audience. But he did an almost perfectly executed inward heads-up double somersault with triple twist and nut topping.

It put a dent in his image as a naff chump, and he might, from now on, find himself less in demand as a clown. But it also showed you how much an ordinary human being can learn if properly taught. I watched the whole thing in envy, yelling along with everybody else, and wondering what happened to my skimpy diving trunks of long ago. Nowadays in Australia they would be called budgie-smugglers. I imagine my mother used them as a duster.

Primal fear was the first emotion on view in an episode of Africa (BBC One) devoted to the Cape area. Out of their nests below the inward edge of the beach emerged thousands of turtle hatchlings, none of them more than 7cm long. They started their 100m dash to the ocean. The 100m might as well have been 100 miles, because almost everything wanted to eat them.

We’ve been seeing this mad scramble by the turtle hatchlings for decades now, but only today is the photography good enough to show you an individual turtle hatchling from close range as it flails away with its tiny flippers in the desperate hope that it won’t be AGH! Snapped up by a crow.

The cameramen fall for their cutely terrified subjects and suffer grief when a crow’s open beak suddenly arrives in the picture. But one teensy turtle hatchling made it all the way to the water. We weren’t told if the camera crew’s choice of this particular candidate was just a fluke. I couldn’t help having visions of a cameraman’s assistant scaring off crows with a gun.

But if it was an intervention, it was a fair one, because the picture painted of only one little turtle in a thousand making it to maturity was exactly right. Nature is prodigal: a nice way of saying that nature is a mass murderer on a colossal scale.

Elsewhere in the same episode, we had the question of why springboks jump straight up in the air with their legs hanging straight down. They aren’t clearing even an imaginary obstacle, so what are they doing? David Attenborough, doing the voice-over, concluded that they were “jumping for joy”.

But he admitted that he couldn’t understand why a huge school of kingfish went so far up river just to swim in a circle. They weren’t even mating, which is the usual reason why any creature does anything. They were just swimming in a circle.

To have come so far just to steam around in a circle looked impressive and sad at the same time. But at least they had kept their mystery. In nearly all respects, the tragedy of existence is that sooner or later Attenborough will come along and explain what you’re doing. “And this old male human being is turning into a television critic. Gradually and inexorably, he disintegrates…”

I was unkind to a couple of the competing colleges in University Challenge (BBC Two) a while back. The recent contest between UCL and Jesus College Oxford proved that some of the youngsters are as clued-up as ever, and not just in the sciences. And as a correspondent reminded me, you can’t blame young people for not knowing much about the poetry of the Thirties. For them, it’s a long while ago. Glumly, as I swim in a circle, I have to admit that this might be true.